A “biometric crosslink” is defined as a biometric record that has biometrics and/or data (i.e., biographic information) collected from more than one person. A biometric crosslink record can occur if the workflow for the multimodal biometric capture process is such that biometrics from different modalities or subjects becomes intermixed in a multimodal biometric record. Biometric crosslink records can occur wherever there is potential for enrollment processes to be compromised, such as, for example, in hostile enrollment environments or in places with inadequate enrollment quality control.
Biometric crosslink records compromise the integrity of a biometric data repository and create challenges for identification or verification processes, because only a subset of a subject's modalities may be matched in the same record. Consequently, it degrades the performance of an ABIS (Automatic Biometrics Identification System) and impedes overall operational effectiveness.
Repair of biometric crosslinks can be complex, computationally intensive and time consuming because of the potentially large number of possible combinations and the exponentially increasing nature of the number of required comparisons. For example, repairing n crosslinked records requires nm comparisons, where m is the number of different modalities.